As Usual, Paint Stripping

I probably shouldn't bother to post daily updates when I'm doing paint stripping. Yeah, I did more paint stripping. Today I started stripping with the chemicals. I got a late start but I still got a decent amount finished before I called it quits.

I now believe the medicine cabinet door is a modern replacement because of the way it has been constructed. None of the other cabinet doors in the house are assembled like this. Maybe it was a custom size frame? At least they used douglas fir.

Jeff and Eric started putting woodwork back into the bathroom in the window area but I haven't taken pictures yet.

Dissatisfied Customer

It is amazing to me how a company can turn a satisfied customer into a dissatisfied customer with so little effort on their part. I have sung the praises for Custom Cedar Products in the past. They were great to work with when we built our fence. But today they made me VERY angry and I am not going to use cedar in my bathroom project now.

Last Saturday I went into the store with my friend Storm and we sifted out 32 pieces of 10' tongue and groove to install on our ceiling. Because the wood has so much variation in grain and color we spent over an hour sifting thru the different piles to find a nice batch of them that were fairly uniform in grain and color.

Because we could not fit that quantity of wood in our compact car, we paid for the wood and left the sifted batch of wood at the store and promised to arrange for transport. Well, today we sent our friend Eric to pick it up and they simply gave him 32 random pieces of 10' T&G. He arrives at our house and I learn it is NOT the stack we had previously hand selected so I call the company back. Dwayne tells me he knows nothing about there being any wood set aside for me. He walks back to the section where the wood is kept and there is no trace of the stack we hand selected.

So, in their failure to put aside my PAID FOR order, they lost a customer, at least for this project. In the meantime, I have found douglas fir T&G at McCoy Millworks for half the price and I simply called and ordered that instead. We'll go ahead and finish it with marine varnish so the type of wood won't actually matter.

Bathroom Progress

We're making pretty steady progress now. I spent several hours yesterday stripping paint from most of the pile of woodwork we need for the bathroom. I've just got one piece left to finish today. Ironically, this went fast enough that I'm adding to the pile. I'm going to go ahead and strip some pieces we don't immediately need so I don't have to go thru this messy process again for quite a while (I hope).

This is the original crown originally installed above the windows. I couldn't find a modern equivalent without having it custom milled so I decided to just strip this piece since it removed in one piece.

Here is the stack of wood for the bathroom, all stripped with the heat gun. I started on the medicine cabinet door, but discovered it had been painted with one or two coats of paint and that's actually too thin to remove with a heat gun. I'll hit it with chemicals on the next pass. Now I'm left wondering if they replaced the door previously, or if they stripped and repainted it.

While I was stripping paint, Jeff primed the bathroom. Then, later in the evening I painted it twice. We decided to go with the white hyacinth we've got painted on our ceilings throughout the house because it was a pretty good match to the tile. I had expected to paint the room in the ruskin room green, but it just added one more color and I thought it was too much. (We didn't bother to paint the areas where the tile wainscoting is going to be installed.)

Our mosaic tile floor plan fell apart because of the mismatched red tile. We can't get either the cinnamon or the red tiles in less than 6-8 weeks and we don't want to delay the project that long. And there is still no guarantee the reorder will be the correct color so we simply decided to change the plan AGAIN. (I think this might be Plan D.)

I dug through my period catalogs and my pinterest tile board and I found this nice two-color border from a circa 1900s American Encaustic mosaic tile catalog. Of course we didn't originally order enough green tile to do this new pattern, so we have to order more green, but that hopefully will only delay the project another week.

Barrett was planning to start laying the tile floor today, but because of having to reorder the tile his schedule is delayed again. I truly hope this is the last major delay and we'll be able to get started next week.

Period Mosaic Floor Tile Catalog

In my search yesterday to replace my floor plan I found this beautiful full-color mosaic tile catalog, circa 1900. I believe you can buy a reprint of this tile catalog from the Tile Heritage Center for $75, or you can download it for free from Virginia Commonwealth University Library Digital Collection here.

OMG, this catalog is stunning. The color plates are a marvel. Download it yourselves, but I'm going to share a few of my favorite patterns. Wow, I wish I was rich. I'd fill my house with these. I've had a weakness for mosaics for many years.

Paint Stripping Progress

I went this morning and bought the cedar for the ceiling. We discovered when we built the fence that cedar has a lot of variation in its color so Storm and I spent at least an hour picking thru the tongue and groove display to find pieces with a fairly uniform color. I'm looking forward to seeing how it looks installed.

I still need to go and buy the new fir molding but I thought I should strip the paint on the old wood first so I could see what would be reusable and what pieces need to be replaced.

I spent several hours stripping wood today. I got thru the first pass on quite a lot of the wood I need to strip for the master bathroom. It went even faster when it occurred to me that there were a few pieces I could just flip over and send thru the planer. On those, I just stripped the edges and whatever drips of paint had run down the backside. I need to strip about 4 more pieces with the heat gun, and then I can turn to the chemical stripping step.

Yuck, More Paint Stripping

I just keep repeating to myself, "This is the last room. I CAN do this."

I was originally planning to just replace all the woodwork in the bathroom with new fir, but my initial hunt thru the molding catalogs of our local suppliers doesn't give me much faith I'll be able to find the crown pieces I need. So, I went and took a peek out in the garage to see what we had to salvage.

Jeff and I dug around and I discovered quite a few of the pieces removed without breaking. And I was able to find more than enough of the flat trim boards to install around the windows and for the baseboard trim. And the door casing removed without breaking (much) so I'll go ahead and strip the paint off that.

I really only need to buy a couple replacement pieces and strip the paint off 52 feet of painted trim and we'll be set.

Master Bath Tile

Barrett, our tile guy, brought out the mosaic floor tile last night. Sadly, the red is the wrong color. We picked up a sample in late summer when we were looking for matching colors and the tile he ordered around October is not the same color. He called Dal Tile and apparently reds are not always the same. The new red looks too bright and candy cane and it doesn't look period to us. In theory we could special order a custom color but we really only need 6 square feet of it and who knows how many months it would take (and how expensive it would be).

Barrett is still working on the problem, but we likely have to change the tiling plan. We are actually expecting to go back to the original plan, which is tiling based on this floor. Since our master bathroom will have stained woodwork trim like the rest of the bathrooms, we think the rust tile will look OK as it will blend with the woodwork rather than the deco tiles.